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An inmate who shared a cell with Michael Clark shortly after Marty Grisham was killed in 1994 said Clark talked about the shooting and appeared to nod when asked if he shot Grisham.

Walter Stackhouse -- who was in the Boulder County Jail on check fraud charges at the same time Clark was also in jail for check fraud charges -- took the stand Tuesday, the fifth day of Clark's first-degree murder trial.

According to jail records, at the same time Clark was taken into custody Nov. 3, 1994, Stackhouse -- who had been on work release -- was taken into custody for violating his probation with a positive test for cocaine. While they were in the same room, Stackhouse said Clark began to talk about the shooting investigation.

Stackhouse said when he asked Clark if he, in fact, had shot someone, Clark appeared to nod, though he never explicitly said he shot anybody.

"He didn't really say anything; he just sort of nodded his head," Stackhouse said. "He said, 'The guy is dead,' and just kind of hushed up."

He testified that Clark said police would never get a conviction because they would not find the gun. He said Clark also was concerned that his Marine Corps recruiter had seen him with a 9mm gun. Stackhouse testified that he asked to speak to someone at the jail the next day because he thought he had information about a murder case.

Clark's attorney Nelissa Milfeld called Stackhouse's motivation for testifying into question. Stackhouse continued to say he was never promised anything either in 1994 or presently in exchange for the information, but Milfeld pointed out that despite the probation violation, Stackhouse was later placed back on work release.

Boulder County Sheriff Joe Pelle -- who interviewed Stackhouse as a police commander in 1994 -- testified that the decision to place Stackhouse back on work release had already been made before the interview and that police have no say over work release assignments.

On Tuesday, Stackhouse said his time away from a California prison -- where he is serving time for false imprisonment -- will cost him the job he had in the prison as well as the cell he had. He also said it could be a "death sentence" if his fellow inmates found out he was testifying against a former cellmate. But he said he felt testifying was the right thing to do.

"I have morals," he said. "If something happened to a person I loved and a person hadn't been arrested for 18 years, I would hope to God somebody would come forward. I would hope for closure."

Deputy District Attorney John Kellner then asked Stackhouse for a final time if Stackhouse was sure Clark was admitting to the murder when he nodded his head.

"Was there any doubt in your mind what he was saying?" Kellner asked.

"No, not at all," Stackhouse said.

Grisham, 48, Boulder's director of information services, was shot four times in the head and chest after answering a knock at his apartment door the night of Nov. 1, 1994. No one saw the gunman.

The missing gun

In an interview with federal agents in 2011, Clark admitted he got a 9mm gun from his high school friend Dion Moore but said he did not remember what he did with the gun.

FBI special agent Jonathan Grusing -- whom Boulder police Detective Chuck Heidel called in to assist with the investigation -- took the stand Tuesday and testified that in April 2011 he went to see Clark at his workplace in Silverthorne to talk to him about the gun.

Grusing and an ATF agent talked to Clark about the gun, saying they were investigating the pawn shop where Moore said he asked someone to buy him two 9mm guns similar to the one used to shoot Grisham.

In an interview tape, Clark admitted to getting the gun from Moore. He told Grusing he did not remember how long he had the gun and did not remember what happened to it, though he said he did not sell it or give it to someone.

When asked why he got rid of it, Clark just said he "probably got nervous having it." He told the agents he may have dumped it in a Dumpster in Denver.

Clark had originally told police in 1994 that a stranger had left the gun in his car and that he later gave the gun to a random person he saw in Denver.

Records show that a man named David Berring purchased two 9mm Bryco Jennings handguns from ABC Loan and Pawn. Berring recalled being asked to buy the guns from a man matching Moore's description.

Two Colorado Bureau of Investigation ballistics experts said without a gun to compare to the shells and bullets found at the scene, the best they could do was narrow down the makes and models that could have possibly fired the rounds. The tests showed a Bryco Jennings was one of the possibilities, but they could not say for certain that the murder weapon was a Bryco Jennings.

'Cool under pressure'

Two women whom Clark called the night of the shooting also took the stand Tuesday. The 911 call reporting that Grisham had been shot was at 9:35 p.m. Nov. 1, 1994.

Allyson Hackman said she received a call at around 9:45 p.m. from Clark, and Kristin Baulsir said she received a call at 10:30 p.m. Both said it was unusual for Clark to call them at that time of night, but neither said he sounded nervous about anything or distracted.

But Assistant District Attorney Ryan Brackley asked Hackman -- who briefly dated Clark after the incident -- if he ever told her about his previous arrests or his time in jail, to which she replied no. She said he did not mention he had stolen checks from Grisham, nor did he mention he had called Grisham's credit union that day.

"So it sounds like the defendant is someone who is cool under pressure?" Brackley asked. Hackman said she didn't know if that was true or not.

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